Im Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996 by Kathy Acker

Im Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996 Reviews

• 
  Jeff Jackson

  Cari Luna (author of "The Revolution of Every Day") and I had an email correspondence about this book of collected emails between Kathy Akcer and Ken Wark. We talked about privacy, literary persona, and posthumous publication. It's a fascinating book that I personally found somewhat problematic. You can read the full email review at Electric Literature:
  http://electricliterature.com/im-very...
• 
  Jenny

  not sure wark understands simpsons or beavis and butthead
• 
  Tom Buchanan

  This book sucks.
  
  Kathy Acker is the best of all time, but Mackenzie Wark is just the worst. She's so self-satisfied with her limp critiques and theatre scrim-thin engagement with queerness and otherness, and at one point she starts talking about "racism" against (white!) Australians (vis a vis Rupert Murdoch!) Jesus.
  
  Can we all just admit how lame and boring Semiotext(e) is at this point?
  
  2023 Update: Wark has transitioned so I edited my use of pronouns but left my embarrassing misapprehension of her queerness for posterity. This book still sucks, though!
• 
  Margaret

  Creeping on a couple's love letters? Yes please.
  
  It's even more interesting when the two participants are no modern Heloise and Abelard but much more complex, and well modern in the sense that their discussions of gender, culture, and their relationship are something that at least I haven't seen published as letters before. I'm even more impressed that this was published when one of the correspondents was still alive, since these are also deeply personal.
• 
  Bronwyn

  This was really fun, though you have to go in with the right mindset. It *is* just a lift of a couple week's emails between two authors romantically circling one another, so you have to be willing to be patient when the text is not so sparkling or, shall we say, revelatory. The messages are occasionally painfully posturing and grad-school cool (I mean, you have two experimental writers thrusting their plumage at each other... what do you expect?), and there are probably too many references to literary theorists that I don't have the patience to actually read anymore (except for Judith Butler, who I will read any day of the week, still).
  
  But it's lovely when you get a peek at the scared little humanity of them: "But now I imagine I can sense you hiding, a perpetual motion machine in my hands, between the lines."
  
  "It's the lying half awake, in the morning with someone, that I like best. Like happy mammals."
  
  "It's interesting how the value of the past with someone depends on how much they keep faith with that shared past."
  
  And this description of why Acker felt she couldn't go to political functions makes me laugh: "My earrings would make too much noise."
  
  
• 
  Hennie

  I love email
• 
  Taube

  MIT Press describes this publication of e-mail correspondence between Kathy Acker and MacKenzie Wark as "a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I’m Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time." Quite frankly, it wasn't this. Anyone reading this short text with such elevated expectations is bound to be profoundly disappointed. These e-mails contain a lot of academic and sexual posturing that comes across like a performance or a forced gymnastic--theoretical name-dropping without relevant attachment to real ideas. (And yeah, I use the word "real" with some Platonic trepidation.) Acker's repeated protestations of tiredness, of drunkeness seem... less than iconic after a while. Yet, despite these complaints, I did find this interesting at times-- and felt that John Kinsella's afterward definitely integrated and advanced this problematic text for me in a way that made this book "seem" much more than its rather meager epistolary parts.
• 
  Thomas

  Two writers have a three-night stand in Australia and go back to their relative countries; one gets in touch with the other and thus begins a hectic fortnight of back-and-forth emails in which two people who obviously like each other talk about anything but their feelings. This book prints those emails, and the result in one of the most engrossing, messy, romantic, modern love stories I've ever read. Actual novels have a lot to learn from this book.
• 
  Emily

  wow wow wow. This blew me away. If you like reading about gender, or pop culture, or postmodern theory, or political theory; if you want to hear the 90s through the perspective of people who lived it and saw our current political climate with prescient clarity, this is the book for you. I loved it and I want everyone I know to read it. One word of warning: it’s a little slow to start - stick with it, it’s so rewarding.
• 
  Pahail

  "Про гетеродерьмо. Игры. Верхний/нижний — это постельные игры. Кто кого фистит. За пределами постели у меня своя жизнь, а у тебя своя. И я ненавижу блядские игры власти за пределами постели, мне не интересно в этом участвовать."
• 
  Kate

  "If you wanted to know how brainy nerds of a certain period fall into courtship, this is your book."
• 
  Lena

  это очень хорошо – особенно если читать в период, когда вы в очередной раз вкрашились в прекрасную леди из тиндера и переживаете весь ад отвратительной страсти (так мне не нравится это слово but whatevs)/влюбленности и непоняток.
  
  пьяные сообщения Акер – это моя новая религия. Уорк мне не понравился, потому что это как читать сообщения из тиндера от человека, который сразу хочет обсуждать слишком умные вещи. Акер тоже любит их обсуждать но lowkey и с самоиронией. в философии и около я даже не пыталась разобраться. моменты реальной уязвимости (мне показалось) – те, где они пытаются проговорить, что между ними происходит. боже это настолько интимно, что дискомфортно и хочется закрыть книжку и сказать "ой ой ой кажется я не должна была это видеть".
  
  короче, супер
• 
  Frankie

  Some serious cringe moments, of not just the cultural variety. I’m certain my 90s email threads would be worse. But I loved it for Acker, who changed my life/mind at the time these emails were written, and I later traced over some of the same spaces, which made it just so meaningful to read.
• 
  Eline Cremers

  “A deep desire to connect: aerially, rhizomically, physically, textually.”
• 
  Arcadia

  "how friends who have just become friends position themselves for love."
  
  Beautiful epistolary exchange between two icons. From Bataille and Blanchot to Beavis and Butthead, Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark blaze through the academic (despite Acker's protests of, 'this isn't a very academic email') and the gossip of everyday. It is fascinating to read this testament to a recently defunct time; the era of email, an actualised postal service, still foreign to the world of instant messaging. The form yields itself to easy reading regardless of the heady topics the two thinkers take on at times.
  
  Ultimately throughout these emails we have two queers talking queerness and their discomfort with labels: gay, bi, boy, girl. Acker veers towards the masculine ('sometimes I fetishise the masculine... spreading legs and drinking beer and grunting...and sweating and being stupid and rubbing your crotch...it turns me on. Must be sort of a mirror...(Am I being clear?) I've got to get over my fears around the feminine...oh all this shitty past...the sexist society past'), Wark, is uncomfortable with the masculine (Wark says of himself - 'I'm not often dick-cenetred these days when I get horny').
  
  As these two try to draw out their three-night fling they talk about their sexual history, past relationships and attempt to bridge the gap of space and time that separates them. They try to forge a common (although community is a concept discussed at length through Bataille and Blanchot) language.
• 
  Marlo

  pure, lurid gossip. deliciously voyeristic and compelling to read two very intellectual creative egos in the careful but romantically and sexually intense process of getting to know each other via text, as one would imagine. so many layers of emotional and intellectual negotiation, of posturing and vulnerability. delivered on its premise heartily.
  
  something unfortunate is that i'm now reading mckenzie wark's "reverse cowgirl", and honestly, the form of her writing here, trying to woo kathy acker, is more engaging and evocative than in the new book. both flit in a similar way from personal exposition to theory to reference, but here more is left to the enquiring mind, the juxtaposition feels alive. i guess this is a premature double book review, but serves perhaps as a reminder that trying to seduce your reader is a reliable starting point, at least, for engaging prose
• 
  Atefeh Ahmadi

  Good for fans, mostly throwing names and talking half-assedly about this and that. It feels like overhearing a routine conversation between two intelligent person. good for picking up the clues and go for more reading.
• 
  Ari

  Enthralling at times, nice to be so deep into a relationship like that. Theory is exhausting. Gender discussion good but also exhausting. Favorite passage was the bit about the coordinates, circling around. How much can you like this book so much as appreciate it?????
• 
  lisa

  Intimate conversation about everything that matters for those two – and you are an occasional bystander who is allowed to quietly listen for a minute.
• 
  Zoe Hannay

  idk about it however describing a text comprised of emails as ‘e-pistolary’ is kind of genius ?
• 
  Elena Vasileva

  Еще одно неочевидное золото подписки No Kidding Press - переписка Акер и Маккензи Уорк, когда Маккензи Уорк еще была Кеном Уорком (да). Они встретились у Уорка в Австралии, провели вместе пару ночей, а потом несколько недель переписывались - и все. Где-то между всем этим был один телефонный звонок, а вся переписка, насколько я поняла, перетекла еще в одну встречу в США у Акер, а потом они расстались. Через пару месяцев Акер поставили диагноз "онкология", через год она умерла - и я пишу это, потому что в таком свете книга становится еще нежнее и трепетнее, да и потому что предисловие и послесловие не оставляют шансов не узнать, что же там произошло. В Акер столько отбитости и столько любви к жизни, что совершенно не верится, что все вот так вот могло - а оно по-другому и не бывает, кажется. Акер и Уорк переписываются так, как мы сейчас в телеграме: они пишут по несколько писем с разными темами и отвечают четко на каждое письмо, при этом постоянно пишут - в основном Акер - чем они занимаются параллельно: завтракают, лежат, готовят лекцию, готовятся к встрече, вычитывают текст. Удивительно недоступная (мне) жизнь без четкого графика и с кучей дел, конечно, совершенно очаровательная и естественная. И очень нежные объяснения и извинения - Акер описывает свою квартиру, извиняется за бардак; Уорк рассказывает, как он спит и почему отворачивается во сне; и так далее, и тому подобное. Но даже Акер и Уорку такие объяснения даются непросто, что уж тут. Неудобно и некомфортно объяснять, какой ты на самом деле и как тебе комфортны/некомфортны другие люди. Если бы я могла разговаривать бы так с некоторыми людьми, клянусь, мне бы стало легче и понятнее жить. А пока я прочла эту книжку, и мне стало немного легче и понятнее.
• 
  Car

  The book--more accurately an archive of email correspondence between the late Kathy Acker and Mckenzie Wark--opens with a letter from Wark, stamped 8 August 1995, to which Acker replies the day before, 7 August. This isn't science fiction but a trans-romance, a courtship across 10,000 miles of land and sea, and 15 hours of time difference. Acker and Wark's long distance relationship is unapologetic for its virtuality; in fact, it flourishes in ideas and imagination. Notwithstanding pornography, polyamory, and constant digressions into fist fucking, at the heart of the exchange is an unadulterated curiosity the writers have for one another that is quite childlike. Acker pleads, "do be my friend"; Wark: "Of course I'll be your friend." There is something pure about the hook-up. From brutally honest truth questions, "What turns you on in women when you're in bed with one?" "What do you like best sexually?" to "explain Blanchot to me," there is not enough distance between them for shyness. Both are eager to admit confusion, that they are sorry when they do not understand, that they are lonely.
  
  A decade before Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Wark and Acker were already well versed on the matter: Loneliness is what we can't do for each other. So they talk at length about themselves through anecdotes and theories. That way, any doubt between the lovers is mitigated by intellectual sparring, and, conversely, any disagreement in theoretical understanding is hushed by an "I miss you" of sort. (Note: the email thread with the subject title "the important stuff" ends with the eponymous line, I'm very into you.)
  
  What is evident is the refusal of both parties to commit converge. For there is no need to get to the specific. No need to put a label to the state of their affairs. This extends to the way in which the writers view the world and the queer politics of the day. For them, there is no sense of distinctions--be they man/woman, top/bottom, straight/gay. The clearer the lines, the more exclusive a group becomes. Difference is well respected, but differentiation leads to demarcation leads to distinction. One is set apart from another and therein is the genesis of hierarchy.
  
  Zero faith in differentiation does not stop Acker and Wark from flirting with categories. To Wark, Acker beseeches, "How to give the best blow-jobs? Guys are good at that." The response is a "not often very dick-centred" one, but it reminisces the couple's sexual encounters. They weave in and out of strongholds and dance on the lines between separates. Beginnings and ends are unimportant; salutes and sex aren't too. As Wark puts it, "Sometimes the flirting is as good as it gets. The sheer unlimited possibility of it..."
  
  At the end of the two-week correspondence, virtuality gives way to tactility in a copy of Acker's drawing to Wark inserted just before the last email. The doodles are clumsy and the scribblings fall short of her lengthy ruminations. The childishness is consistent, though too real and confronting for the reader. It almost makes one want to nosedive into the virtual world again, never mind what happened to the relationship afterwards. The desire to be swept up by the emails is not nostalgic, neither is the virtual world one of memory. It was Acker who wrote that memory is redundant. I'm Very Into You does not chase or revive the memory of love. It is interested in the medium of love.
• 
  Emily

  This book was brilliant. While some of the philosophical and literary references were too erudite for the likes of me, I loved the connection this correspondence showed between Kathy and Kenneth, and their conversations about queerness, sexuality and identity were educational, engaging and important, both in the 1990s and now. I only wish there had been more emails, more time to explore the fascinating connection between these two individuals.
• 
  Lea Dokter

  Although quite a few references and points of deeper discussion eluded my grasp, I'm Very Into You moved me more than I thought it would. Through this correspondence, which can hardly be called a love story yet rings with the base human desire for affirmation and affection, the reader gets a peek into the private lives of both contributors. It is certainly unique in the best sense of the word.
• 
  Brook

  A wonderfully strange view into the courtship of two authors. The various travails, drunken correspondences, and attempts to tell the other how they feel are beautiful & sad in turns.
  
  I also love how much they fax
• 
  Thursday Simpson

  Damn. I liked this a lot. Very much to the point, very much kind of heart breaking and beautiful. Seeing Kathy write in Internet lingo is the best thing.
  
  Also that Kathy Acker loves professional wrestling is basically the only thing I'm living for.
• 
  Bookforum Magazine

  "I'm Very Into You is the autobiographer's autobiography, letters from the person who lived inside–and through–the persona generated by her writing and solidified by her celebrity."
  
  –Elizabeth Gumport on Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark's I'm Very Into You in the April/May 2015 issue of Bookforum
• 
  Cari

  Jeff Jackson (Mira Corpora) and I wrote an epistolary review of this for Electric Lit:
  
  
  http://electricliterature.com/im-very...
• 
  Phoebe Mol

  portisheadspace